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Never Let Me Go: Plot
Kathy H, Tommy D and Ruth are three friends who grow up at a privileged estate in the English countryside. They have been there for as long as they can remember. They get medicals every week and are repeatedly told they are special and that they should remain as healthy as possible. They also know they cannot have children. Their teachers, or guardians, encourage them to be creative and write poetry or paint. Every once in a while a mysterious woman known only as Madame comes and has a look at their art and selects some to take away. The children notice that she tries to avoid them and so they decide to see what her reaction is when they brush past her. She shudders and Kathy realises “Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would we feel, being seen like that, being the spiders” (page 32) Faber & Faber edition (London, 2005: viii). Through moments such as these the children slowly start to realise that they are different about them. “Thinking back now, I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves — about who we were how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside — but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant. Because it doesn’t really matter how well your guardians try to prepare you: all the talks, videos, discussions, warnings, none of that can really bring it home. Not when you’re eight years old, and you’re all together in a place like Hailsham; when you’ve got guardians like the ones we had; when the gardeners and the delivery men joke and laugh with you and call you ‘sweetheart’. All the same, some of it must go in somewhere. It must go in, because by the time a moment like that Madame comes along, there’s a part of you that’s been waiting. Maybe from as early as when you’re five or six, there’s been whisper going at the back of your head, saying: ‘One day…you’ll get to know how it feels.’ So you’re waiting…for the moment when you realise that you really are different from them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you — of how you were brought into this world and why — and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself in the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange” (page 33). Tommy is not very good at art and starts getting teased about it, which escalates into him having tantrums and giving up on trying to be creative. One day one of the teachers, Miss Lucy, has a chat with him and says it’s fine if he’s not arty and his tantrums begin to subside. There are sales where items come from the outside and the students get the opportunity to acquire possessions that they can cherish as their own. “The Sales were important to us because that was how we got hold of things from outside… That’s where we got our clothes, our toys, the special things that hadn’t been made by another student” (page 37). At one of these sales Kathy finds a tape of Judy Bridgewater with the song Never Let Me Go (see title). A couple of months later the tape disappears. Kathy and Tommy start to speculate about incidents and conversations that they have encountered through the yearw and finally put two and two together and realise they are clones, created for the sole purpose of providing organs for other people. They leave Hailsham at sixteen and move into a place called The Cottages, an old farm that has gone out of business. Tommy and Ruth are now a couple and Ruth is always trying to be the leader and keep the upper hand. They focus on petty everyday issues and seem to accept their destiny without questioning it. Ruth is mostly concerned with impressing the older inhabitants and keeping up appearances about how meaningful her and Tommy’s relationship is and how worldly she is. Kathy feels left behind because she doesn’t have a boyfriend and hasn’t had sex yet. But she starts to get sexual urges and has sex with a few different guys. One day Kathy and Tommy encounter each other in the barn. Kathy is looking through porn magazines because she thinks her sexual urges mean she was modelled after a prostitute and Tommy has started doodling imaginary animals because he has heard a rumour that if a couple can prove they are really in love they can get a deferral and live together for a couple of years before they have to start their donations. He thinks the art at school was to see what a person’s soul is like, and so he has started drawing again because he hopes to find Madame and show her his work so that he and Ruth can get a deferral. When Kathy tells Ruth about her desires, Ruth acts as if this is a bit sick and that she shouldn’t mention it to anyone. An older couple, Chrissie and Rodney, then tell the three that they visited a town called Cromer on the Norfolk coast and they claim they saw a person who could be Ruth’s possible, the person she was modelled on. The woman works in an office, and this is the ideal life Ruth would like to have lived. So the three friends and the couple visit Norfolk together. Ruth encourages the older couple to believe all sorts of rumours about students from Hailsham, that they can get deferrals, that they can have careers, while Tommy and Kathy don’t want to play along, but don’t say anything for Ruth’s sake. They finally go to the office and look through the window to see if there is a woman whom Ruth looks like. At first they all think she could be Ruth’s possible, but then they follow her to an art gallery and the more they look at her the less she looks like Ruth. The illusion is shattered and Ruth rants that they should look in the gutter for their models, because they come from “junkies, prostitutes, winos and tramps” (page 152). Rodney and Chrissie shy away from this truth and suggest they go see a friend of theirs who is a carer. Ruth goes with them and Tommy stays with Kathy, who says it’s against the rules. Tommy confesses he’s trying to find a copy of Kathy’s tape and they go rummaging around in shops looking for it. They’re enjoying themselves till Kathy finds the tape herself and all the fun is over. Kathy tells Tommy about her sexual urges and why she is looking through porn magazines for her possible. Tommy comforts her and says he feels like that too sometimes, so it’s nothing to worry about. Soon after that Ruth and Kathy are chatting when Ruth tries to put Kathy off Tommy, because he supposedly doesn’t like girls who have been with lots of guys. Then she acts as if she has no idea what Kathy is talking about when she mentions certain facts about Hailsham, and Kathy decides it’s time for her to leave and become a carer. A few years later Kathy has had some success with caring for a few donors and an old classmate suggests she become Ruth’s carer because she can now pick her donors. They also talk about the fact that Hailsham is now closed. Ruth has had a bad first donation and Kathy goes to take care of her. But Kathy realises that Ruth doesn’t trust her, almost as if she “had been waiting and waiting for Kathy to do something to her” (page 196). Kathy decides the arrangement is not working, but before she can report this a story starts doing the rounds about a boat stranded in the marshes. Ruth hints that she would like to go see it and Kathy decides to take her. Tommy is also at a centre nearby and he goes on the trip with them. Ruth tells Kathy that she and Tommy drifted apart after Kathy had left. Tommy and Kathy rekindle their friendship on the trip and Ruth urges them to try to get a deferral. She apologises to Kathy about lying about her urges and says she kept them apart and asks Kathy to forgive her. She gives them Madame’s address and asks them to go to her. Ruth and Kathy become good friends again. “All the guardedness, all the suspicions between me and Ruth evaporated, and we seemed to remember everything we’d once meant to each other” (page 214). Ruth urges her to become Tommy’s carer. Then Ruth makes her second donation and “completes”. Kathy becomes Tommy’s carer. She reads to him and they chat about the old days. They start having sex, but “right from that first time, there was something in Tommy’s manner that was tinged with sadness, that seemed to say: ‘Yes, we’re doing this now and I’m glad we’re doing this now. But what a pity we left it so late’” (page 218). They finally decide to go and see Madame. They find Miss Emily there too, and she tells them that it was never true that students could get a deferral. She explains that Hailsham was an experiment, “an example of how we might move to a more humane and better way of doing things” (page 236). The art work for Madame was because they “thought it would reveal students' souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all” (page 238). Miss Emily and Madame campaigned for clones to be treated better and to demonstrate “that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being. Before all that clones – or students as we prefer to call you – existed only to supply medical science. In the early days, after the war, that’s largely all you were to most people. Shadowy objects in test tubes” (page 239). The clones are used to treat diseases like cancer and people prefer not to think about the conditions they were raised in or if they are human at all. Places like Hailsham and their beliefs were gaining ground when a scientist decided to create children that were superior to humans. This frightened people and they didn’t want to think of cloning anymore, so no-one wanted to back the humane movement and no one sponsored Hailsham or wanted to be associated with cloning anymore, so it had to close down. Miss Emily says that they never really told the students what lay ahead of them so that they could have a childhood and happiness that no one can ever take away from them. Kathy talks to Madame about the incident where she saw her dancing to Never Let Me Go and asks her why she was crying. Kathy thinks Madame was crying because she could see Kathy was dreaming of having the child she never could, but Madame explains: “When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else, I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go” (pages 248 – 249). When they drive back, Tommy asks Kathy to stop. He gets out and has one of his tantrums. Kathy calms him and suggests this is why he was always having tantrums as a child, because he knew “somewhere deep down. Something the rest of them didn’t” (page 252). Tommy slowly starts to identify more with the other donors and asks Kathy not to be his carer anymore, because he doesn’t want her to see him helpless. He says they are like two people caught in the current in a river, but try as they might they cannot hold onto each other and “they’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how I think of us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever” (page 258 – 259). They say goodbye and Tommy completes. Kathy accepts her fate and though she has lost everything, she will never lose her memories of Hailsham, so even though she will also be sent to a centre to become a donor she will have her childhood with her “safely in her head” (page 292). References